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This thesis examines the historical context men who slept with men faced in France during the emergence of HIV/AIDS during the late twentieth century. Specifically, it addresses the first and second round of state HIV/AIDS responses from 1987 to 1993. It argues that despite Michèle Barzach’s accolades as “the AIDS minister” she did not create the state response out of her own insights about disease prevention or public health. Instead, Barzach used guidelines set forth in Maurice Rapin’s report on the state of the nation’s HIV/AIDS responses, the Rapin Report. In addition, this thesis argues against Martel’s popular history, The Pink and The Black, that gay communities are to blame for the spread of HIV/AIDS into the general population because of their in inadequate action. Drawing on interviews with Health and Gay Pleasure co-founder, Gérard Pelé, this thesis demonstrates a relatively quick and pragmatic response to HIV/AIDS from the gay community for all men who slept with men. While France was slower to response to HIV/AIDS than most other western European nations at a state level, this research demonstrates that it was not because of distain for the gay men the emergent disease was associated with, but a complex interaction of factors, such as medical doctors not receiving quick or adequate funding for their initial research into the disease and gay men fearing the removal of newly won rights and further stigmatization through associations with disease. From 1980 to 1993, men who slept with men in France legally changed their status as a legally defined pathology and state scourge to a group of men targeted in campaigns designed to preserve their lives and validate their existence as legitimate French citizens.

This thesis looks at sexual metaphors in Enlightenment popular media as a way to view social discontent amongst the third estate. It analyzes both plays and erotic novels, which were used as Enlightenment propaganda, as a way in which to show both how accessible and wide spread the ideologies of the Enlightenment actually were during this time. Ultimately this thesis views the sexual metaphors visible in these media forms as a tool of control for the third estate. In a time when socio-economics was failing the people, these outlets gave the third estate a way to voice and control their narrative of discontent.

This cultural history explores representations of deviant femininity in France at the turn of the twentieth-century.

Historians have longed depicted the year 1813 as the origin of German nationalism - a time during which the German people finally awoke from their regionally divided slumber and, motivated by a burgeoning, romantic sense of common identity, collectively rose up to expel the French invaders,. Not only nineteenth century German historians Friedrich Meinecke, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Hermann Műller Bohn, but also recent authors such as Horst Mőller, Karl Mayer, Marc Raeff, and Thomas Nipperdey, who famously claimed “in the beginning was Napoleon,” have remained faithful to variations of this representation. Only relatively recently have scholars such as Jőrg Echternkamp, Horst Carl, and Ute Planert worked to refine this long-accepted notion, emphasizing that such patriotic-national sentiments flourished mostly among educated urban elites in Prussia and other parts of northern and central Germany. In examining the extent of Napoleon’s influence on the widespread dissemination of German people's growing sense of national identity, historians have typically neglected one demographic in particular: the German soldiers who served in the Napoleonic Wars. In a study of German nationalism, these men are especially important because they were idealized to personify the masculine man in arms that writers so often glorified in the contemporary intellectual discourse. Of particular interest to this study are the men who served in the armies of the Kingdom of Westphalia, the ‘proto-Napoleonic’ kingdom of Napoleon’s Rhine Confederation; it will examine the variegated and competing identities of Westphalian soldiers who served in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Of further interest are the varying degrees to which their writings exhibit Francophobic sentiment, how these anti-French sentiments relate to local, territorial, and national identities, and how the martial-masculine early nationalist discourse informed their notions of soldier-masculinity. By relying on the memoirs of several Westphalian soldiers and comparing them to letters written by Westphalians throughout the Napoleonic Period, this study will evaluate which identities these soldiers most strongly cultivated and assess the extent to which they retrospectively reinterpreted or nationalized their experiences in their writings. It will thus situate Westphalian soldiers within the historiographical debate concerning the War of Liberation.